The people who you describe as valueing backwards compatibility are exclusively downstream consumers of others work. They value infinite free labour by others to any maintenance by themselves. This is of course a perfectly rational but unsupportable position.
The great thing about free software is that they have the legal right to do that maintenance, and it's actually not very difficult to do. The Python 3 Statement was an attempt to use public shaming to disincentivize them from doing it. Astoundingly, it seems to have been successful.
Regarding open source that labor is expensive, rare, and at any given time insufficient to need. In this case it also has a value only in context of the majority containing to do it. What is being signalled here is a lack of desire to keep doing it followed by nobody opting to volunteer for the mission.
Basically you've been a guest long enough and now the towels, entertainment, and snacks are going away. If this appears blunt it is pretty obvious why bluntness is required anything else asks for a decade of free support given by inched at the expense of more laudible goals.
No, what is being signalled here is the intent to publicly shame anyone who continued to maintain backward compatibility. Given that public humiliation is among most people's greatest fears, in retrospect, it shouldn't be surprising that anyone volunteered for the mission. But it did surprise me.
Your comment would be correct if we were discussing a lack of continued support for Python 2, or even a public announcement of a planned cessation of such support. But we're discussing a public promise to break support for Python 2, in the form of a petition seeking more signatories. Although the difference may be too subtle for you to have noticed, it's an entirely different animal. It's like the difference between hotels that don't promise you a room that allows smoking, and hotels that promise you a room that doesn't allow smoking. The second case is a promise to keep your room free of the nauseating stench of Python 2.
But what user would want that? Why would you prefer a language or a library that promises to break backward compatibility? What's the benefit to you of the language making your code cease to function every year or two? Job security, perhaps?
They would want that because the cost of constantly saying no to users with attitudes that range from grateful to entitled is non-zero. Support requests for 16 year old software should come with a support contract and a check.
I suspect anyone willing to pay enough could get support for whatever they please and with enthusiasm.
No, it's obvious why Python maintainers would want to drop backward compatibility. What I don't understand is why users would want it. I thought that was pretty clear in my comment; I'm not sure how you managed to misinterpret it to be saying I didn't understand something that's obvious.
At this point you have seriously transgressed the boundaries of civility; having been informed that you had completely misinterpreted my previous comment, the least you could do is to apologize. Instead you are responding with sarcastic remarks apparently predicated on the same misinterpretation you've just been corrected on. You've exhausted the presumption of good faith. Probably even your initial comment was merely trolling; the exaggerated wording full of absolutes and stereotypes should have clued me in.
I know you really, really want me to think that I was owed new Python 2 versions of other people's libraries, but I'm not going to. I've already explained several times that what I think is bad is not people dropping backward compatibility with Python 2, but demonstrating the intent to publicly shame anyone who continued to maintain backward compatibility.
All of your comments are arguing against a position I've never held as if it were my position, well after you have no reasonable excuse for that error. That's dishonest and offensive.
